


The Monster in the Dark

by Steerpike13713



Series: Exiles Together [2]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alas Poor Redshirts, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Good people doing bad things, Original Character Death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-28 12:29:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10831305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: There was a man crouched amidst the bags on the docking bay floor. Hardly a stone’s throw away, visible only in silhouette, but Miles saw him. And heard him, heard a soft voice hissing and muttering to itself on the very edge of hearing.“-for the unmarked bag, you said. Easier to blend in, you said…where is he? Should’ve…hmm…”Miles and Davis froze, and glanced at each other for a moment before Davis reached for his phaser and began inching closer, heedless of Miles’ hissed warning.“This is a restricted area – Starfleet only. Give yourself over now, or-”The man looked up. A slight flare of green light illuminated the shaven head and over-bright eyes, the rail-thin body, the bandages around his arm…the bandages just where the tear had been in the augment’s sleeve.“I don’t want to hurt you, Ensign,” the Augment said, its voice shaking.





	The Monster in the Dark

All of Starfleet had been on high alert for the best part of three months when the _Enterprise_ got a hit on the augment, and their orders had already changed three times from ‘kill on sight’ to ‘capture’ to ‘raise the alarm and wait for security’ to ‘capture’ again. Honestly, Miles had never expected he’d be the one to have to carry them out. Augments were…were something out of history books and horror stories, or pathetic, maladjusted creatures in secluded hospitals. But then, out of nowhere, up had popped Julian Subatoi Bashir, and a thousand conspiracy theories about where he might have gone or what larger scheme he must have been plotting. Miles hadn’t found much time for them then. It was all pretty sensationalised stuff – mad scientists had created a new Khan, a group of deranged augments were already slowly taking over Starfleet from the inside, Khan himself had risen from the dead to start a new Eugenics War. Paranoid ravings, Miles had thought those were. More fool him.

The new _Enterprise_ hadn’t even been finished yet when the stories started to spread, and their first missions hadn’t taken them anywhere near the ongoing search for the augment. Miles had almost let it slip out of his mind, an irrelevant bit of news that would be resolved soon enough. It hadn’t felt _real_ to him before. Then, of course, the news had come that the augment had been spotted. Or rather, the aftermath of him had been. No-one dead, which was a minor miracle in and of itself, but a ship had been found drifting not far from some nowhere station, left to starve or run out of air, but clumsily so – the occupants had been found in a matter of days. They hadn’t known who their passenger was at first, except that he had paid in latinum and preferred to be left alone. Probably they’d been mixed up with something illegal, you didn’t find many legitimate uses for latinum in Federation space, but there was nothing to be pinned on them, and malnutrition was the worst problem any of them were treated for. The augment had worked quickly – got access to the ship’s computer, confined everyone to quarters, fought tooth and nail to get away from the few crew-members who’d still been free and stolen an escape pod, leaving the ship drifting in space to freeze and starve if they had not been so close to the station. By then, the augment had been long gone.

The _Enterprise_ really shouldn’t have had anything to do with it, except that they were the closest Starfleet vessel when the alert went out that he’d been spotted again, hardly a month after the first time and apparently entirely by chance. What were the odds of two clear slip-ups in the space of four months, with something like this? But the images matched – the bearded, long-haired passenger ‘Dufresne’ on the cargo freighter and the scruffy-looking spacer in worn coveralls caught on camera at a shuttleport on Mariposa a month later. A pattern was starting to pop up – colony worlds, space stations, places where there was a lot of casual labour coming through and a few strangers weren’t anything special. That was what the dispatches said, anyway. Quite how they got that from one sighting on Saturn One, one on a long-haul freighter in deep space, one on Mariposa, scattered across four months, Miles still wasn’t entirely sure, but it made sense. Unfortunately, it was also pretty hopeless as a way of telling where he was going next, or where the rest of his cell were. And there was a larger cell – all of Starfleet was certain about that one. An augment alone couldn’t have gone unnoticed in Starfleet that long, anyone could see that. Wherever the augment was going, he was taking the most circuitous route imaginable to get there, and he’d manipulated his way around shuttles before – that was how he had finally gotten off Earth, the news reports had claimed. Unfortunately, this time he’d been forced to resort to going on a fast shuttle to Spaceport 401. No other stops, and a message already on its way to the captain of the ship. All there ought to have been for the Enterprise to do should’ve been picking up the prisoner at the other end. And, augment or not, Miles’ money was on Worf for that particular fight.

The trouble started the moment they got to the Starbase, because of course it did. There was a reason the Enterprise’s reputation was the way it was, and it wasn’t the safe, easy ride you got on missions or the infrequency of disasters of every scale.

“He can hardly have disappeared into thin air!” Captain Picard was saying when Miles arrived on the bridge. “Have you checked your logs?”

“Three times – there’s no record of Amin Dufresne leaving this shuttle, and no sign of him among the remaining passengers.” The shuttle captain, a nervous-looking Caitian with fur Miles couldn’t help but think of as ‘calico’ despite knowing how offensive the comparison would be, shifted. “You- We aren’t going to be held here too much longer, are we?”

“That remains to be seen.” The captain’s expression closed off, if anything, still farther. “Is there any sign of him on the ship’s monitors?

“Far too much of one – the feedback’s looped. We didn’t notice until we started moving people off the shuttle.”

If Picard had looked angry before, now he seemed positively thunderous. “You let passengers start leaving? _Knowing_ that you had a wanted terrorist aboard?”

“The message said to behave normally! If we’d tried to stop him, who’s to say there wouldn’t be bits of my crew scattered all over the base by now?”

“That would at least have made it obvious where he was,” Picard said dryly, “Mr Bashir has already given himself away once. A second time would be pure madness. Chief O’Brien will go over your ship’s monitors and logs to see where the alterations have occurred – dismissed.”

The screen flickered out, and the captain huffed out a sigh. “Number One, prepare a team to rendezvous with station security. I want this man found.”

It was quick work – they had the team ready before they even reached the starbase itself. Starbase 401 was right on the edge of Bajoran space – Cardassian space, now, though there was word that the rebels were making gains. Miles only hoped that was the truth – the further away he was from the bastard spoonheads the better, so far as he was concerned – but it did make things delicate. If the augment got away here, there’d be no telling which way he’d jump, and if the Cardassians caught him and held him long enough to get the secrets out of his genes…Miles tried not to imagine a whole army of bioengineered Cardassians, and then to pretend he wasn’t shaking in his metaphorical boots at the thought.

The flow of passengers off the shuttle had been stopped, at least, when Miles and Ensign Davis beamed down, but there was still a flood of people coming in from the civilian space-docks, and even their Starfleet uniforms couldn’t clear them a path entirely.

“Hey, watch it!” O’Brien grumbled, as a lanky, shaven-headed young man almost knocked straight into him, and careened away without so much as looking up. “Ok, let’s see these data banks…”

It took a while to get the passengers quarantined while a security team went through those that remained one by one, hoping they’d come in time. Getting the shuttle itself away to a separate hangar to let Starfleet check it over took about as long, and by the time Miles finally got his hands on the data-banks themselves it felt like he’d spent most of a morning standing around doing nothing.

“This is pointless,” he muttered, “The station’s in lockdown, he can’t have _left_.”

“They said that about Saturn One,” Davis pointed out, “And he got out of that too.”

Miles snorted, “They didn’t know for sure he’s been on Saturn One until a week after the blockade was lifted – plenty of time to slip out unnoticed before the search parties got back. And no-one was searching that hard then.”

That had been before the full details of the augment’s gene-scan had been published, and that had been big enough news that even Miles, distant as it had all seemed, had heard the details of it discussed a hundred times over in Ten-Forward after shift. Oh, not the mental stuff, though that was off the charts, but that was…not normal, none of this was normal, but there were others like that. Sad, damaged cases who lived quiet, confined, perfectly pleasant lives in homes and hospitals. The rest of it…hand-eye coordination, stamina, vision, reflexes, weight, height, strength. Whatever the Bashirs were claiming now – the trial had dragged on long enough that it was difficult to keep track – there was no way they’d done all of that just to get their developmentally-disabled son the boost they said he’d needed. By the time _that_ had been known, of course, the augment had disappeared. Even with all of Starfleet looking for him, the Federation was a big place, and stopping every traveller who looked even a little like the augment just wasn’t feasible – at least, not without seriously overstepping the bounds of Starfleet authority.

The data banks glowed green – starting up again – and Miles was abruptly alert, wrist-deep in the workings of the nearest one. Whoever had done this loop job, they hadn’t been great at it. A rush job by an amateur, Miles thought, and an amateur who hadn’t bothered to look up more than the bare bones of how to do the job and hadn’t thought about what would happen next.

“I don’t think much of his technical skills, whatever he is,” Miles remarked, even as he tried to unpick it. “You’d think whoever sent him would come up with a better extraction plan.”

Davis shrugged, “Maybe they’ve got enough of them that losing one isn’t a major issue for them.”

Miles shot him an alarmed look, “Let’s not even joke about that. Hey, I think I found it!”

The loop, such as it was, hadn’t been running the whole time. It had been patched in during a period of suspiciously-timed turbulence that Geordi and his boys were already looking into, and taken a while before that.

“Think he was tampering with the engines, chief?” Davis asked, his eyes going wider.

“Shouldn’t put money on it, if this is his idea of going under the radar. Either that or he was in a rush and getting sloppy.” Miles grinned. “Maybe we’ve got him scared.”

Davis smiled back, looking absurdly hopeful. It was unlikely, Miles knew. Probably the augment was already lying low somewhere – security was combing the station, but without much hope, given the augment’s history of improbably narrow escapes – and they’d find they’d missed him by a mile. Or maybe they wouldn’t. This was the _Enterprise_ , after all. Doing the impossible was pretty much what this ship and all its predecessors _did_.

Basic or not, it was difficult to detangle the loop without destroying the real records it had overwritten, and Miles reluctantly upgraded his opinion of the augment’s talents by a few notches. Talented amateur, perhaps, without much formal training where this sort of thing was concerned. Really, it wasn’t Miles’ specialty either, but he’d taken a few classes in basic, which Geordi never had, so here he was.

“Guessing this is where it was taken from,” he said, tapping the screen at around zero-two-hundred hours, ship’s time. “There’s a little skip at zero-two-zero-three – people aren’t in quite the same places.”

It was a damn close match, though, even so, even for a roomful of sleeping people.

“There!” Davis said, jabbing a finger at one sleeping man. “That’s Dufresne- Bashir – the augment.”

“You’re sure about that, Jack?”

“Got to be – those are the same coveralls, you can see the tear in the sleeve from the security vids on the freighter.”

Miles peered at the vid – well, Davis wasn’t wrong. That distinctive y-shaped tear in the sleeve, not even mended or patched, exposing a flash of brown skin.

“Good eye,” he said, “You’ve really got a knack for that sort of thing.”

Davis grinned. “Ok, so...let’s see if we can’t take a look at what he was _really_ doing, why don’t we?”

‘What he was really doing’ proved to be ‘not much’. They watched as the augment – a scruffy, bearded man in work-stained coveralls, his hands jammed deep into the pockets – got up from his bed, apparently to use the facilities, and disappeared out of the field of the camera towards the refreshers. These shuttle installations were cramped, and there were only so many places you could put a camera. But the augment didn’t come back.

They fast-forwarded the tape, played it back, froze frames, but there was no sign of him, even after the other passengers began to wake up and it would’ve been easy to lose himself in the crowds. No bearded, long-haired passenger in coveralls, no distinctive torn sleeve.

“He can’t’ve locked himself in the john until they reached the base,” O’Brien muttered, “They don’t let you use ‘em once they’re docked, on these small shuttles. Besides, you’d have had people hammering the door down before too long.”

“He can’t’ve just disappeared,” Davis said, scowling at the monitor. “Ok, what about while everyone’s leaving. He’d have to come out then, or we’d have had more trouble quarantining the passengers.”

“Let’s take a look – can you get us a list of all the passengers that are still left?”

“I can ask.”

It was slow work, and dull, but they managed to narrow it down – there weren’t images attached to the original manifest and list of names, but the remaining passengers all had valid ID of one sort or another to go off. That narrowed it down to a dozen, _the_ dozen who’d left the ship before Starfleet had been able to shut it down.

That was the worst of it – according to the numbers, everything had gone perfectly normally. Sixty people had got on the shuttle, and of those, twelve had been let through their net, forty-eight more were still in custody, not counting cabin crew. And yet, not one face on the monitors matched up with Amin Dufresne – black-haired, black-bearded, bulkier than the first pictures of the augment had shown. Even limiting the scan to the human passengers, there were perhaps ten on the ship overall who looked anything like the augment, and with a _doctor_ that was no guarantee at all.

“He can’t have performed emergency plastic surgery on himself in a shuttle toilet!” Davis declared, throwing up his hands. “Or…not without waking someone up, anyway.”

“Put it to the security team,” Miles said distractedly. His combadge went off, and he tapped it impatiently. “Geordi?”

“Good news, chief. We found the interference with the engine.”

O’Brien blinked. “You did?”

“Yep. Pretty neat work, too. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised – the profile said the augment was taking a couple of engineering classes in the Academy.”

“Wouldn’t have guessed it from this mess,” O’Brien said, and snorted. “We’ve got all sixty passengers accounted for, still trying to wind things back enough to work out which is the one to watch out for – security ought to keep an eye on the cabin crew, too – he could’ve switched with one of them after take-off.”

“Will do, chief.”

After that, it all got a lot simpler and a lot more complicated very quickly. Security had managed to hear a few things, but not much. No-one paid much attention to another itinerant hand, and if it weren’t for the sleeve, and the cut on the arm below, no-one would’ve remembered him at all.

“Physician, heal thyself,” Davis had quipped when he’d heard that, and Miles had snorted with laughter. Later, that joke would be the thing that stuck out in Miles’ mind when he thought of what happened, and the memory would last much longer than any recollection of Davis’ face.

It happened like this: the passengers were still in quarantine, those who had got away being chased down by station security – all but three found now, but among those three was Amin Dufresne, and that part of the whole thing was, blessedly, none of Miles’ business. Someone else would find the augment, and do so very cleverly and win a commendation. Well done them. Miles would go back to his quarters with the satisfied feeling of a man who no longer had to deal with this shite, which seemed like the best reward of all. The shuttle itself was still in a holding bay, though most of the forensic examination of the engines, at least, was over. Everything else would need to be gone over by station security, who had the resources for this sort of thing, before the shuttle could be released.

Really, Miles and Davis shouldn’t have been going that way at all, except that it was quicker to cut through the holding bay, empty and carefully marked off as ‘Starfleet Access Only’, than to go the long way ‘round by the station. It was the sort of harmless corner-cutting that wouldn’t have cost anyone anything in the ordinary run of things, and Miles was probably going to regret it for the rest of his life.

“-telling you, chief, it’d be worth it,” Davis was saying as the doors slid open, the lights on the other side flickering faintly, just the greenish glow of the safety-lights to illuminate the shuttle itself, and the little bundles of belongings from where the hold had been emptied to search for their missing augment. “Just to see the look on his smug face when we beat the Science division out this year.”

“Getting disqualified isn’t going to help us do that,” Miles pointed out, still slightly distracted. He wanted a good shower, a hot meal and not to have to think about _anything_ , but especially not augment escape-artists, for a good hour or two. “I don’t know, Jack, it sounds-”

He stopped dead.

There was a man crouched amidst the bags on the docking bay floor. Hardly a stone’s throw away, visible only in silhouette, but Miles saw him. And _heard_ him, heard a soft voice hissing and muttering to itself on the very edge of hearing.

“-for the unmarked bag, you said. Easier to blend in, you said…where is he? Should’ve…hmm…”

Miles and Davis froze, and glanced at each other for a moment before Davis reached for his phaser and began inching closer, heedless of Miles’ hissed warning.

“This is a restricted area – Starfleet only. Give yourself over now, or-”

The man looked up. A slight flare of green light illuminated the shaven head and over-bright eyes, the rail-thin body, the bandages around his arm…the bandages just where the tear had been in the augment’s sleeve.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Ensign,” the Augment said, its voice shaking with something close to laughter.

“Stand up!” Davis repeated, and Miles would remember thinking, later, that he was trying so _hard_ to sound like Commander Riker in a mood just then. “Keep your hands where I can see them!”

The Augment stood, slowly and carefully. “You’re making a mistake,” it said.

Miles fumbled for his own phaser. “You heard him!”

Slowly, the Augment raised its hands. “I’m not going back,” it said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

Davis continued forward, phaser raised, heedless of Miles behind him, advancing more cautiously. “You’ll stand trial on Earth,” he said warningly, as Miles shifted around to get a better angle – he’d been issued a phaser too, though he hadn’t held one since the war, and now…now-

He did not quite see it as it happened, except that Davis’ finger had twitched on the trigger of his phaser, and the Augment-

Miles had never seen _anything_ move that quickly. Davis had stood too close, he’d been knocked backwards, and Miles-

Miles was standing once again in the bloody ruins of Setlik III, stock-still, frozen in place as the scene played out in front of him.

The Augment was trying to bolt now, whatever it had been searching for forgotten, but Davis wasn’t that easy to knock down and grabbed the Augment’s arm, only to be sent flying halfway across the room by one wild blow, landing with a sickening crack against the shuttle itself and sliding down- Miles didn’t see where he’d landed.

The Augment barely slowed, weaving blind between the scattered bags towards the door, and Miles, his hands shaking, blood and ash in his mouth, his eyes seeing both this empty holding bay and the carnage of that isolated little settlement after the Cardies had finished with it- Miles brought up his own phaser, levelled it at the Augment’s back.

In the shadow of the doorway, the Augment froze. It turned, slowly, carefully, and standing below the light over the exit hatch, Miles could see it. The dark, impassive face, the gleam of light off the shorn stubble across its head, and the eyes – oh, those eyes.

There was nothing in those eyes – no shame, no guilt, no pity, no love, no hatred. They gleamed greenish in the light of the docking bay, and Miles remembered red eye-shine in the dark and the shadows of other men and-

His finger would not move on the trigger. He did not know why. In front of him, the silhouette kept shifting back at forth, one moment human, one moment Cardassian, and his hands were shaking. And still, the Augment stood there, quite still, staring at him with eyes as black as the night and as terrible as the pit.

And then, all at once, it turned, and it ran, and Miles had done _nothing_ -

He pressed shaking fingers to his combadge, did not remember what he said and turned around to look for Davis.

He did not have to look long.

Davis was lying at the foot of the shuttle, and he was dead. His chest cavity stove in as if by a blow from a hammer, a puddle of blood and grey matter already starting to form around his head. The phaser slipped from Miles’ fingers, the world greying out around him. No…no…

He was still standing there when security arrived, and he wouldn’t remember, later, half of what he said in the debriefing, or in the report that followed. He didn’t want to remember the awful, slack, wide-eyed look on the dead face, or the eyes – those eyes – in the dark.

Somehow, though, the memory never left him.


End file.
